


While I Look Around At My Possibilities

by weakinteraction



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: F/F, Time Loop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-02
Updated: 2019-02-02
Packaged: 2019-10-16 14:04:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17551067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/weakinteraction/pseuds/weakinteraction
Summary: In desperation, Villanelle lets Eve in on her biggest secret: her ability to time loop.





	While I Look Around At My Possibilities

**Author's Note:**

  * For [strangeallure](https://archiveofourown.org/users/strangeallure/gifts).



* * *

_1st Iteration_

Eve woke with a start.

She tried to get up, but found she was strapped down. Looking round, she realised she was on a gurney, with an IV running into her arm; a drip bag hanging off a stand to her left was already half-empty, an oleaginous solution that seemed to have a hint of a blue glow to it running from it through the drip chamber into her arm.

"Villanelle!" she yelled, thrashing ineffectively at the restraints tying her to the bed.

"Ah, honey, you're awake," came the voice she had expected -- there was hardly anyone else who might have kidnapped her in the middle of the night and started pumping her full of god-knew-what. Villanelle came into view, brushing a few flakes of pastry from the corners of her mouth and then gobbling them off her fingers.

"What the hell have you done to me?" Eve said.

It had been three months since Paris. Three months in which Eve had essentially gone into hiding, but three months in which there had been no sign of Villanelle being active. Some people had told Eve that she had probably bled out, but Eve had always known better.

"Do you know why I never miss my targets?" Villanelle asked, as though she was a professor trying to get her class to really _think_ \-- for a moment, Eve thought of Anna, and wondered whether Villanelle was apeing her teaching style, consciously or otherwise. "Wait, never mind, we all know the answer to that." She leaned in close to Eve's face, half leering. "It's because I'm very, very good at my job. So, new question: why do _none_ of the agents of the Twelve ever miss?"

"Because they're all very, very good at their jobs?" Eve said. If playing the role got through this faster, so much the better.

Villanelle laughed as though Eve had just told the best joke in the world. "No," she said eventually. "It's because of this stuff." She tapped the drip chamber a few times. Then a tiny droplet forming and falling seemed to catch all her attention; she watched it, as enchanted as a child watching snow falling outside their window on a winter's night.

"So what does it do, turn me into a psychopath like you? Is that what you want?"

"Ah, no," Villanelle said. "It's a bit more complicated than that."

"So what the hell _are_ you doing to me?"

"Every time I'm about to go on a job, I take a little dose of this," Villanelle said. She twisted the bag round so that Eve could read the label: "Chrono-XV". "If everything goes fine, which it does, because I'm very, very good"--she flashed a disturbing smile as she pulled out a small blister pack of pills--"I take one of these. The antidote."

"And what happens if you don't take the antidote?" Eve asked, resigned to being forced to receive information in just as much of a painful drip-by-drip process as she was being given whatever drug "Chrono-XV" was going to turn out to be.

Villanelle slammed her hands together in a loud clap. "BAM! The state of my brain gets sent back to my brain when I first took the drug."

"What?"

"It's a ... non-local quantum entanglement effect, I think they said? Who cares? _It works._ "

"So, what you're saying is, you're a ... time traveller?"

Villanelle took on a mock stern look and wagged her finger. "We don't call it that. It's a _mental_ transference. Information only. No physical object makes the journey. That would be impossible!" She laughed, too high and too loud.

"All right then, your mind, your _consciousness_ travels in time?"

Villanelle smiled. "Well, you know, I only actually did it the once, when I was being trained. But yes, you get to live the whole day over again."

"A day?"

A shrug. "It depends on the dose. That's the standard."

"And is that what you're giving me? The standard dose?"

"Why wouldn't I?"

"This is insane," Eve said. "But then nothing in my life has really been sane since I met you." She looked at Villanelle with as determined a look as she could muster, strapped down to the bed and with her mind half-heartedly trying to mount a rebellion against believing everything she had just been told. "There's one thing you haven't told me. _Why_ are you giving it to me?"

"Oh, that's simple. I need your help."

* * *

Villanelle explained: that she had been sent to Barcelona, her first job in a long time. She was vague about who the target was, insisting that it wasn't important. What was important was what had happened when she'd returned to Paris: a nuclear explosion, assumed to be a terrorist attack.

Eve could scarcely believe it, time travel aside, but the detail of her story was compelling.

And later that day it was all too believable, when she saw it play out on the news, in grainy camera-phone footage taken by tourists in the outskirts -- the ones who hadn't been immediately incinerated -- that turned to scenes of utter horror.

Villanelle had insisted that they had to try to figure out what had happened, work out how to stop it. Well, she had said "tell me who I have to kill", but it was close enough. Perhaps there were limits to what was acceptable, even for her. Or perhaps she only cared because it was her adopted home town.

Eve had been glad, when she felt her mind being tugged backwards, out of her brain, back to the start in Villanelle's safehouse. If Villanelle was right, if they could avert such a tragedy, it would be worth it.

* * *

_10th Iteration_

"This _is_ him, right?"

They were in a cleaning cupboard on the Metro, Villanelle pointing a gun at the man who had been identified as the bomber in the immediate aftermath of the blast. They had spent the last seven repeats tracking his movements on the day, to the point where they could intercept him here, long before anything started.

But Eve had instincts, good ones; ones that had been right about Villanelle herself. She felt sure that he was just a bewildered tourist. "No," she said quietly.

With her free hand, Villanelle frisked him, quickly extracting a passport from his inside pocket. She tossed it to Eve. "That's the guy, right?"

"I don't think it is," Eve said. At Villanelle's look, she said, "I _really_ don't. You're good at your job, I'm good at mine. This _isn't_ the guy. Killing him isn't going to fix anything."

"You're going to kill me?" the man said.

"No," Eve said. "No," she repeated.

"Not even a little bit of maiming?" Villanelle asked. "Ah, you're no fun."

"Where are you going today?" Eve asked.

"As far the fuck away as I can from you two," the man said.

"Be careful, I might decide to let her maim you," Eve said.

"Fine," he said. "Today I was going to visit the Île du Cité--"

" _De la_ Cité," Villanelle said automatically.

"Whatever. Then the Eiffel Tower."

"See, that's where it happens!" Villanelle said.

"Unless he's going to get radicalised in the next eight hours, he's just a convenient fall guy," Eve said. "I'm sure of it."

"What the fuck is going on here?" the man said.

"Shut up," Eve and Villanelle said together.

"You're going to go about your day the way you originally planned," Eve said. "Except that we're going to be there with you, seeing what you do."

"And if you don't, I'll fuck you up," Villanelle said.

"She absolutely will," Eve assured him.

* * *

The shadow of the tower was lengthening.

"We need to move now if we're going to get clear of the blast radius," Villanelle said, matter-of-factly.

Eve had a sudden vision: of the tower vaporising, of the shadows that would be cast onto the concrete by all the bodies that burned away immediately. "You're right," she said.

"No one contacted him," Villanelle said. "And he hasn't collected any bomb. Whatever's really going to happen, it's nothing to do with him. You were right."

"You don't have to sound so upset about it."

"A week! We wasted a fucking week! We don't know anything more than we did the first time."

"We might still be wrong," Eve said. "If nothing happens, we know he is the guy and we just repeat what we did today."

"And if not?"

"We'll figure it out," Eve said. "We have all the time in the world."

Villanelle laughed at that.

* * *

_33rd Iteration_

It had been over a month, and they had made what felt like precious little progress overall. Eve could barely think straight.

The bombing had indeed still happened after their encounter with the alleged bomber. After a few more goes-around, the name and image that was circulated after the blast started to vary -- sometimes it was still him, but there were others in the mix as well. That more than anything else had convinced them that it really was just the authorities scrambling for somebody to blame, to look like they were in control of the situation.

They had pursued other leads. There had been several early morning flights to Barcelona, in case the Twelve's sudden re-activation of their agent was not a coincidence. But there had been nothing to find there. They had started to work with Kenny, getting him to hack into the databases of the various agencies tasked with nuclear non-proliferation, feeding him the information that he himself had given them the day before. All they had found was that the world's nuclear stockpiles were far less secure than was generally known, and the people in charge of trying to do anything about it almost laughably incompetent.

Today, Eve had insisted that they rest properly, for fear that they would continue to make no headway while utterly exhausted. Oksana had relented, grudgingly at first, until she had hit on the idea of taking Eve shopping in the West End.

Money was no object, since the whole day was going to be reset, and Eve had to admit that the clothes were gorgeous, even if she did feel uncomfortably as though Oksana was turning her into a doll to be dressed up.

Afterwards, they went out to the most expensive restaurant they could find that hadn't been booked out months before, in the very fanciest of the dresses they had bought. Eve felt gorgeous.

Oksana was gorgeous too. But she was determinedly not thinking about that.

"Is it fraud?" Eve asked through a mouthful of caviar.

"What do you mean?"

"I don't know," Eve said. "Credit card fraud? We spent all that money and we're never going to pay it back."

"All right, number one: who cares? Number two: we're saving the world. They owe us."

Eve finished her plate, but the questions were still nagging at her. Over the main course, she picked up the theme again. "But there are other ethical implications, aren't there?"

"I'm sure you're dying to tell me what they are," Oksana said, her voice completely flat.

"There are all sorts of things that happen today," Eve said. "There are people fucking," Eve said, not bothering to moderate her volume. "Somewhere, there are people fucking right now."

Oksana turned to the couple nearest them, who were busy looking scandalised. "She obviously doesn't mean you two. You probably haven't for years." They flushed red and went back to eating their meal in stony silence. Oksana turned back to Eve. "Tell me about the people fucking," she said, a playful tone in her voice that Eve didn't entirely trust.

"It's not just fucking. Fucking's a bad example. It's all the other things. Like people deciding to get engaged, or -- oh, I don't know. There are things going on all the time, things that _us_ doing things differently might make happen differently. So are we changing the future, every time? Not just in the way we want to, but ... in all sorts of tiny ways? Do we have the right?"

"I get it now," Oksana said. "It's not that Chrono-XV turns you into a psychopath. It's that it turns anyone who isn't a psychopath _really boring_."

Eve started laughing then, and didn't stop for a long time.

* * *

But the day still ended as every day had, with Paris erupting in a fireball.

This time they were in Oksana's safe house, watching the TV coverage, drinking champagne out of mugs and still wearing their expensive outfits. Oksana flinched against Eve's side as the footage played out again. Her reaction was not what Eve would have predicted. She would have thought that Oksana would be revelling in the chaos, or simply jealous that someone else had caused it. But she seemed to find it just as genuinely horrifying as Eve herself did.

"We're going to fix it," Eve said quietly.

The bulletin had started in on precautions that people should take as the fallout spread through the atmosphere. Keep your windows closed. Wear a handkerchief over your mouth when you go outside. It was only one step up from duck and cover.

Eve turned it off, and stood in front of Oksana, offering her hands to pull her up.

"We just need to work out how."

Oksana grabbed hold of Eve and pulled her back to the sofa, so that Eve fell on top of her. "What was it you said?" Oksana said. "We have all the time in the world."

"Yes," Eve said.

Oksana put out a hand to stroke Eve's hair away from her face. "So we have time for this." Then she leaned up and kissed her.

* * *

_34th Iteration_

Eve woke with a start, to find Oksana kissing her deeply. She was perched awkwardly on one side of the bed, keeping herself away from the drip.

Memory flooded back, and Eve returned the kiss passionately, using her free arm to grab onto the back of Oksana's head.

Eventually, they broke apart.

"Last night was good, huh?" Oksana said. "I have to admit, I had to bring myself off when I woke up again."

Eve felt as though her heart stopped for a moment.

It was so obvious. She felt as though she should have known all along; that a part of her _had_ known all along, but her conscious mind had rejected the information, unable to deal with it on top of everything else.

"That isn't the standard dose, is it?"

Villanelle followed her gaze to the drip bottle. " _Technically_ , I didn't lie to you. I said 'Why wouldn't I' give you the standard dose."

"And the reason is, that for all this to work you have to kidnap me _every_ morning and start the infusion. Otherwise we wouldn't go back together at the end."

"I had to measure out the Chrono-XV very precisely," she said. "I was so pleased when it worked, the first time." She smiled. "But I've got very good at the whole thing now. And you know, it's fun, getting to play out the little variations. How to get over to England, where to steal the equipment from ..."

"You're so fucked up," Eve said. "I can't believe--"

She frowned. "You knew full well exactly how fucked up I am when you fucked me last night. Don't make _this_ about that."

Eve sank back into the gurney, defeated. "We have bigger concerns anyway."

"That's right," Oksana said. "Now, we've had your precious day of rest. Time to get back to work."

* * *

_79th Iteration_

They burst in on Kenny, again. Most days when they needed his help, they waited until after eleven o'clock, so that he would at least be dressed, but the information they had found out last time felt urgent. Or as urgent as anything ever did any more.

A few weeks ago, they had found a loose end, yet aother possible breakthrough. Elena -- who, perhaps uniquely among their various allies, always did what Eve asked, without asking too many questions -- had got them in to a half-abandoned MI6 vault full of files about weapons of mass destruction, the contents of which were supposed to have been digitised but apparently hadn't been. When they found the files they were looking for, they were missing; the references to them still existed, but the files themselves were gone.

It was Oksana who had found the single sheet of paper that had fallen out of one of the files and down inside the back of the filing cabinet. The classification level it claimed was one Eve had never heard of, but its content she was all too familiar with by now: Chrono-XV. It was a page densely packed with technical information, obviously only one part of a far longer report.

If MI6 had known about Chrono-XV, possibly even been involved in its development, then how had it ended up in the hands of the Twelve? And why did MI6 classify it as a WMD?

That was when they had gone back to Kenny. Over days and days, he had gradually penetrated the Twelve's own deeply hidden online archives.

Yesterday, he had found a copy of the file the missing page came from, without that page being included. The file _had_ been digitised, just not by MI6.

"Eve, what the hell?" Kenny said as he scrambled to put on his dressing gown. "And what's _she_ doing here?"

"He says that every time," Oksana said. "It's getting _really_ boring."

Eve ignored both her and Kenny's confusion, logging in quickly to Kenny's computer to reproduce everything she had seen him do over the last twenty-two iterations, everything she had painstakingly memorised.

"Where the hell did you learn to do that?" Kenny said.

"I had a good teacher," Eve said, getting back up from the chair. "But I can't get past ... here."

Kenny peered at the screen. "This is-- What _is_ this?"

"The Twelve use the Dark Web," Oksana said. "They probably _invented_ the Dark Web."

"What is she doing here?" Kenny asked again.

"We're working together," Eve said. "It's complicated. We wouldn't have made all this progress without her."

"Just yesterday, you were still hiding out from her almost certain attempt at revenge."

"Like I said, it's complicated."

"Oh, fuck it, I'm going to tell him this time," Oksana said. "We're repeating the day," she told him. "Over and over."

"Oh," Kenny said. "Like Edge of Tomorrow."

"Groundhog Day," Eve said firmly. "There's a reason it's a classic."

"Yeah, but in Edge of Tomorrow you have to keep going over and over to save the world."

"We don't have to die, though," Oksana said earnestly. "In fact, dying is really bad. Especially if we both do."

Eve was struck by a sudden thought, that perhaps the only reason Oksana had dragged her into all this was as an insurance policy.

"Whereas in Groundhog Day," Kenny went on, "it's all about keeping going until you get the girl, isn't it?"

"Shut up and work," said Eve.

"I am working," Kenny said. "Men can multi-task too. Look."

They looked. It was a grainy scan of medical documentation completed in triplicate -- English, Russian and Chinese.

"Holy shit," Oksana said with feeling.

"That's a _very_ high dose, isn't it?" Eve said, not taking her eyes off the screen.

"Years' worth," Oksana said. "Maybe decades. And look ..." She pointed at one of the names: Konstantin Vasiliev. "The shit!" she exclaimed. "He was one of them. He always claimed to just be a low level functionary."

"What the hell is all this stuff?" Kenny asked. He scrolled down the scanned document a little further. "Wait, is that my mum on this list?"

"It is," Eve said. "It's your mum. Your mum on a list of twelve names."

* * *

The file revealed that the development of Chrono-XV had been recognised by the world's intelligence agencies as a threat far greater than any other: all the biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in their countries' arsenals were as nothing to the ability to manipulate time itself. And so, even in the coldest depths of the Cold War, they had made a secret pact, without their superiors' knowledge. Twelve agents, from MI6, the CIA, the KGB, the DGSE, and a handful more, had been given an enormous dose of the drug. They would guard against any attempt to abuse the powers of the drug, using their foreknowledge to prevent its spread.

But something had gone wrong. Somehow, the Twelve had become the threat, had decided to take matters into their own hands. They had even been distributing the stuff to their assassins.

Oksana was as grimly determined as Eve had ever seen her. It seemed that it was going to be one of their assassins that was going to do something about it.

* * *

_87th Iteration_

Eve woke with a start.

She was back in her body, _again_.

"Hey, honey," Oksana said brightly. "Today's the day."

"Yes," Eve said. "Yes, I think it is."

* * *

All their digging had shown that Carolyn was in Paris on the morning of the bombing, but had left from de Gaulle shortly before midday.

The first class lounge was a strange place to be having this sort of confrontation, but here they were. Eve had bought herself a ticket -- still not as expensive as the dress she'd had the chance to wear that time, what felt like so long ago now. Meanwhile, Oksana had got herself a uniform -- Eve had decided it was best not to ask exactly how -- and was cheerfully serving drinks to the various passengers.

Eventually, Carolyn entered. Eve looked up from her newspaper. Everything in it was utterly familiar to her, yet utterly irrelevant, banal -- the petty concerns of a world about to be transformed by a terrifying attack.

"Good morning, madam," Oksana said brightly. "What can I get you?"

"You," was all Carolyn said in reply.

"No," Eve said loudly, striding over from where she had been sitting. "Us."

Carolyn's hand went to the inside of her coat, but Oksana shook her head. "Bad idea," she said.

"Very bad," Eve said, subtly indicating the gun in her own pocket. "You can't shoot both of us before one of us can get you."

"How do you know?" Carolyn said. "Who leaked?"

"Nobody," Oksana said. "We figured it out for ourselves."

"Impossible," Carolyn said. "It was--"

"We've had months," Eve said.

Carolyn looked at her blankly, then comprehension slowly dawned. She turned to Oksana. "You gave her Chrono-XV?"

Oksana smiled. "Oh, yes. Very clever of me, I think."

"We shouldn't have this conversation here," Carolyn said, glancing round at the other travellers, the other staff.

Eve quickly considered all the ways that Carolyn could try to turn the tables if they moved. "No, I think here is perfect," she said.

"Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen," Oksana said loudly, then repeated herself in French. "I'm extremely sorry, but we are having a problem with our plumbing and the lounge will have to close until we can get it fixed." She said the whole thing again in French, then whispered to the other member of staff behind the bar, who started shepherding them out.

"What did you tell her?" Eve asked after they had all left. "No, wait, I don't want to know, do I?"

"Very well," Carolyn said. "You've got what you wanted. Now explain."

"I think rather it is you who needs to be doing the explaining," Oksana said.

Carolyn sighed. "Do you know how old I am?"

"Eighty?" Oksana guessed sarcastically. "Maybe a hundred?"

"I have lived through the last thirty-five years _five times_ ," Carolyn said. "I remember watching dozens of my children grow up, children who never now existed. I remember watching the whole world die in the nuclear fires. I remember swearing with the others to put aside our differences, to put it right. You've always thought our victims were random, that the goal was to cause chaos, destabilisation ..."

"It wasn't?" Oksana said. "I have to admit, I'm kind of disappointed."

"Everyone we sent you and the others to kill was a key player in at least one timeline," Carolyn said. "Threats that had to be contained."

Eve looked at her. "Five times, you said."

"Everything we did, it wasn't enough. We could postpone the apocalypse, change the details of how it happened, but it always did. Yet this time, it seems as though we've managed it. More or less."

"But the Paris bomb ... if you've seen a nuclear armageddon, why do you want to unleash it again?"

Oksana clapped her hands in jubilation as she worked it out. "It's running out, isn't it? You're about to go back, unless you take the antidote. Maybe not immediately, but some time this year, I bet."

"Yes," Carolyn admitted. "It seems as though this time, we've managed it. But to keep the world on the right path ..."

"So what?" Eve said. "You want to scare everyone into behaving? Remind everyone how bad it could be? No, wait ... This is an excuse to install a worldwide police state."

"You put it so melodramatically," Carolyn said. "So negatively. But ... yes."

"You've got so used to controlling the past that you want to carry on being able to control the future."

"There's more to it than that, isn't there?" Oksana said. "Konstantin. He was one of the Twelve. He was one of the Twelve, and you sent me to kill him. Or, if not you, one of the others did."

"There were ... disagreements. Some of us thought that this iteration of the timeline was the best we could probably manage, others that we could do better still."

"Right," said Eve. "It only takes one of you not to take the antidote for the whole thing to be reset."

"And worse still, the rest of us wouldn't even know that they were coming in from another timeline."

"But if you die--" Oksana began.

"I convened a meeting," Carolyn said. "We have ... protocols for these things, in dire circumstances."

Eve rolled her eyes. "You mean, you lured them all to Paris so that you could wipe them out in your nuclear blast, and be the sole survivor, the only one who got to decide whether or not this was the correct timeline."

"Yes," Carolyn said. "It's for the best, you have to believe me."

"Sorry," said Eve. "I don't." She glanced at Oksana. "Do you remember what you asked me, back at the start of all this?"

"Tell me who I have to kill."

"I think I have your answer."

Oksana's lips twitched into a smile.

"You'll have to kill all of us," Carolyn said. "To avoid the reset."

" _That_ sounds like a fun challenge," Oksana said, and pulled the trigger.


End file.
